Here we are, five episodes deep into PJ-RFVotD and still no sign of Weather Report or Spyro Gyra. Well, get used to it. First off, a candidate for this series has to be psychedelic (nicely defined by Wikipedia as “creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetters”) and those bands are anything but. The fusion part we can kinda think of in its more generic sense of “a merging,” and so I don’t feel a particular need to exhaustively hunt down jazz-rock-pop practitioners who meet the narrow definition of “fusion jazz.” All this yapping serves as prologue to today’s selection, a grainy 1988 security-cam-quality video of dead guitar god Sonny Sharrock, whose heroic, saxophone-like guitar blasts supported Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, and NYC noise-jazz unit Last Exit. Supposedly, he though of himself as "a horn player with a really fucked up axe,” which I think this clip aptly demonstrates, starting at around 2:30. If you dig the sound, you could do worse than scoring a copy of his final album, the mighty Ask the Ages (which, believe it or not, you’ll find at branches throughout the Albuquerque Public Library system–clearly the guy who placed the jazz CD order had good taste).
Psychedelic Jazz-Rock Fusion Video Of The Day V
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